Paper
Conviviality and collectives on social media:
Virality, memes and new social structures
by
Piia Varis© & Jan Blommaert©
p.k.varis@tilburguniversity.edu
j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu
© September 2014
Journal of Language and Politics, special issue on
“the importance of unimportant language” (Blommaert & Varis, eds. 2015)
Conviviality and collectives on social media:
Virality, memes and new social structures
Piia Varis & Jan Blommaert
Abstract
There is a long tradition in which “phatic” forms of interaction are seen as (and
characterized by) relatively low levels of “information” and “meaning”. Yet,
observations on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such
phatic interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori
determination of the meaning. We address the issue of “virality” in this paper: the
astonishing speed and scope with which often “empty” (i.e. not a priori determined)
signs circulate on the internet. We address “memes” – signs that have gone viral on
the Internet – as cases in point. Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises
specific issues about signs, meanings and functions, prompting a shift from “meaning”
to “effect”. This effect, we can see, is conviviality: the production of a socialstructuring level of engagement in loose, temporal and elastic collectives operating in
social media environments.
Key words: phatic communion, social media, virality, memes, meaning, function,
community, identity.
Introduction
In a very insightful and relatively early paper on the phenomenon, Vincent Miller (2008)
questions the ‘content’ of communication on social media and microblogs (Facebook and
Twitter, respectively), and concludes:
“We are seeing how in many ways the internet has become as much about interaction
with others as it has about accessing information. (…) In the drift from blogging, to
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social networking, to microblogging we see a shift from dialogue and communication
between actors in a network, where the point of the network was to facilitate an
exchange of substantive content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network
itself has become the primary focus. (…) This has resulted in a rise of what I have
called ‘phatic media’ in which communication without content has taken precedence.”
(Miller 2008: 398)
Miller sees the avalanche of ‘empty’ messages on new social media as an illustration of the
‘postsocial’ society in which networks rather than (traditional, organic) communities are the
central fora for establishing social ties between people. The messages are ‘empty’ in the sense
that no perceptibly ‘relevant content’ is being communicated; thus, such messages are
typologically germane to the kind of ‘small talk’ which Bronislaw Malinowski (1923 (1936))
identified as ‘phatic communion’ and described as follows:
“’phatic communion’ serves to establish bonds of personal union between people
brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose
of communicating ideas.” (Malinowski 1923 (1936): 316)
For Malinowski, phatic communion was a key argument for his view that language should not
just be seen as a carrier of propositional contents (“communicating ideas” in the fragment
above), but as a mode of social action the scope of which should not be reduced to ‘meaning’
in the denotational sense of the term. In an excellent paper on the history of the term ‘phatic
communion’, Gunter Senft notes the post-hoc reinterpretation of the term by Jakobson (1960)
as ‘channel-oriented’ interaction, and describes phatic communion as
“utterances that are said to have exclusively social, bonding functions like establishing
and maintaining a friendly and harmonious atmosphere in interpersonal relations,
especially during the opening and closing stages of social – verbal – encounters. These
utterances are understood as a means for keeping the communication channels open.”
(Senft 1995: 3)
Senft also emphasizes the difference between ‘communion’ and ‘communication’.
Malinowski never used the term phatic ‘communication’, and for a reason: ‘communion’
stresses (a) the ritual aspects of phatic phenomena, and (b) the fact that through phatic
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communion, people express their sense of ‘union’ with a community. We will come back to
this later on.
When it came to explaining the phenomenon, Malinowski saw the fear of silence, understood
as an embarrassing situation in interaction among Trobriand Islanders, as the motive
underlying the frequency of phatic communion. In order not to appear grumpy or taciturn to
the interlocutor, Trobrianders engaged in sometimes lengthy exchanges of ‘irrelevant’ talk.
While Malinowski saw this horror vacui as possibly universal, Dell Hymes cautioned against
such an interpretation and suggested that “the distribution of required and preferred silence,
indeed, perhaps most immediately reveals in outline form a community’s structure of
speaking” (Hymes 1972 (1986): 40; see Senft 1995: 4-5 for a discussion). There are indeed
communities where, unless one has anything substantial to say, silence is strongly preferred
over small talk and ‘phatic communion’ would consequently be experienced as an unwelcome
violation of social custom. This is clearly not the case in the internet communities explored by
Vincent Miller, where ‘small’ and ‘content-free’ talk appears to be if not the rule, then
certainly a very well entrenched mode of interaction.
This, perhaps, compels us to take ‘phatic’ talk seriously, given that it is so hard to avoid as a
phenomenon in e.g. social media. And this, then, would be a correction to a deeply ingrained
linguistic and sociolinguistic mindset, in which ‘small talk’ – the term itself announces it – is
perceived as not really important and not really in need of much in-depth exploration.
Schegloff’s (1972; Schegloff & Sacks 1973) early papers on conversational openings and
closings described these often routinized sequences as a mechanism in which speaker and
hearer roles were established and confirmed. This early interpretation shows affinity with
Malinowski’s ‘phatic communion’ – the concern with the ‘channel’ of communication – as
well as with Erving Goffman’s (1967) concept of ‘interaction ritual’ in which people follow
particular, relatively perduring templates that safeguard ‘order’ in face-to-face interaction. In
an influential later paper, however, Schegloff (1988) rejected Goffman’s attention to ‘ritual’
and ‘face’ as instances of ‘psychology’ (in fact, as too much interested in the meaning of
interaction), and reduced the Goffmanian rituals to a more ‘secularized’ study of interaction
as a formal ‘syntax’ in which human intentions and subjectivities did not matter too much.
The question of what people seek to achieve by means of ‘small talk’, consequently, led a life
on the afterburner of academic attention since then – when it occurred it was often labelled as
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‘mundane’ talk, that is: talk that demands not to be seen as full of substance and meaning, but
can be analyzed merely as an instance of the universal formal mechanisms of human
conversation (Briggs 1997 provides a powerful critique of this). Evidently, when the formal
patterns of phatic communion are the sole locus of interest, not much is left to be said on the
topic.
As mentioned, the perceived plenitude of phatic communion on the internet pushes us
towards attention to such ‘communication without content’. In what follows, we will engage
with this topic and focus on a now-current internet phenomenon: memes. Memes will be
introduced in the next section, and we shall focus on (a) the notion of ‘viral spread’ in relation
to agentivity and consciousness, and (b) the ways in which we can see ‘memes’, along with
perhaps many of the phenomena described by Miller, as forms of conviviality. In a
concluding section, we will identify some perhaps important implications of this view.
Going viral
On January 21, 2012 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an update on his Facebook
timeline, introduced by “Here’s some interesting weekend reading” (Figure 1). The message
itself was 161 words long, and it led to a link to a 2000-word article. Within 55 seconds of
being posted, the update got 932 “likes” and was “shared” 30 times by other Facebook users.
After two minutes, the update had accumulated 3,101 “likes” and 232 “shares”.
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Figure 1: Screenshot of Zuckerberg’s status update on Facebook, January 2012.
Given the structure and size of the text sent around by Zuckerberg, it is quite implausible that
within the first two minutes or so, more than 3,000 people had already read Zuckerberg’s
update and the article which it provides a link to, deliberated on its contents and judged it
‘likeable’, and the same goes for the more than 200 times that the post had already been
shared on other users’ timelines. So what is happening here?
Some of the uptake can probably be explained with ‘firsting’, i.e. the preoccupation to be the
first to comment on or like an update on social media – most clearly visible in the form of
comments simply stating “first!”. Another major explanation could be ‘astroturfing’: it is
plausible that many of those who “like” and “share” Zuckerberg’s update are in fact Facebook
employees deliberately attempting to increase its visibility. We can guess, but we simply do
not know. What we do know for sure, however, is that as a consequence of a first level of
uptake – people liking and sharing the post – there are further and further levels of uptake, as
other users witness this liking and sharing activity (some of it may already be showing in the
figures here), and consequently make inferences about the meaning of the post itself, but also
about the person(s) in their network who reacted to it. Further layers of contextualisation are
thus added to the original post which may have an influence on the uptake by others.
Different social media platforms offer similar activity types: YouTube users can “view”
videos and “like” them, as well as adding “comments” to them and adding videos to a profile
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list of preferences; Twitter users can create “hashtags” (a form of metadata-based
“findability” of text, Zappavigna 2011: 792) and “retweet” tweets from within their network;
similar operations are possible on Instagram as well as on most local or regional social media
platforms available throughout the world. Each time, we see that specific activities are made
available for the rapid “viral” spread of particular signs, while the actual content or formal
properties of those signs do not seem to prevail as criteria for sharing, at least not when these
properties are understood as denotational-semantic or aesthetic in the Kantian sense. We shall
elaborate this below. The ace of virality after the first decade of the 21st century is
undoubtedly the South-Korean music video called Gangnam Style, performed by an artist
called Psy: Gangnam Style was posted on YouTube on 15 July, 2012, and had been viewed
2,065552172 times on 18 August 2014. Competent as well as lay observers appear to agree
that the phenomenal virality of Gangnam Style was not due to the intrinsic qualities, musical,
choreographic or otherwise, of the video. The hype was driven by entirely different forces.
The point to all of this however, is that we see a communicative phenomenon of astonishing
speed and scope: large numbers of people react on a message by expressing their “liking” and
by judging it relevant enough to “share” it with huge numbers of “friends” within their social
media community. At the same time, in spite of Zuckerberg’s message being textual, it was
not read in the common sense understanding of this term. The “like” and “share” reactions,
consequently, refer to another kind of decoding and understanding than the ones we
conventionally use in text and discourse analysis – “meaning” as an outcome of denotationaltextual decoding is not at stake here, and so the “liking” and “sharing” is best seen as “phatic”
in the terms discussed above. Yet, these phatic activities appear to have extraordinary
importance for those who perform them, as “firsting” and “astroturfing” practices illustrate:
people on social media find it very important to be involved in “virality”. People find it
important to be part of a group that “likes” and “shares” items posted by others. It is
impossible to know – certainly in the case of Zuckerberg – who the members of this group
effectively are (this is the problem of scope, and we shall return to it), but this ignorance of
identities of group members does seem to matter less than the expression of membership by
means of phatic “likes” and “shares”. What happens here is “communion” in the sense of
Malinowski:
identity
statements
expressing,
pragmatically
and
metapragmatically,
membership of some group. Such groups are not held together by high levels of awareness
and knowledge of deeply shared values and functions – the classical community of Parsonian
sociology – but by loose bonds of shared, even if superficial interest or “ambient affiliation”
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in Zappavigna’s terms (2011: 801), enabled by technological features of social media
affording forms of searchability and findability of “like”-minded people.
We need to be more specific though, and return to our Facebook example. “Liking” is an
identity statement directly oriented towards the author of the update – Zuckerberg – and
indirectly inscribing oneself into the community of those who “like” Zuckerberg, as well as
indirectly flagging something to one’s own community of Facebook “friends” (who can
monitor activities performed within the community). Patricia Lange, thus, qualifies such
responsive uptake activities (“viewing” YouTube videos in her case) as forms of “selfinterpellation”: people express a judgment that they themselves belong to the intended
audiences of a message or sign (2009: 71). “Sharing”, by contrast, recontextualizes and
directly reorients this statement towards one’s own community, triggering another phase in a
process of viral circulation, part of which can – but must not – involve real “reading” of the
text. Also, “liking” is a responsive uptake to someone else’s activity while “sharing” is the
initiation of another activity directed at another (segment of a) community. So, while both
activities share important dimensions of phaticity with each other, important differences also
occur. These distinctions, as noted, do not affect the fundamental nature of the interaction
between actors and signs – “sharing”, as we have seen, does not presuppose careful reading of
the text – but there are differences in agency and activity type.
This is important to note, because existing definitions of virality would emphasize the
absence of significant change in the circulation of the sign. Limor Shifman (2011: 190), for
instance, emphasizes the absence of significant change to the sign itself to distinguish virality
from “memicity”: memes, as opposed to viral signs, would involve changes to the sign itself.
We shall see in a moment that this distinction is only valid when one focuses on a superficial
inspection of the formal properties of signs. When one takes social semiotic activities as one’s
benchmark, however, things become more complicated and more intriguing. We have seen
that significant distinctions apply to “liking” and “sharing”. In fact, we can see both as
different genres on a gradient from phatic communion to phatic communication: there are
differences in agency, in the addressees and communities targeted by both activities, and in
the fundamental pragmatic and metapragmatic features of both activities.
To clarify the latter: “sharing” an update on Facebook is a classic case of “reentextualization” (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996) or “re-semiotization”
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(Scollon & Scollon 2004). Re-entextualization refers to the process by means of which a
piece of “text” (a broadly defined semiotic object here) is extracted from its original contextof-use and re-inserted into an entirely different one, involving different participation
frameworks, a different kind of textuality – an entire text can be condensed into a quote, for
instance – and ultimately also very different meaning outcomes – what is marginal in the
source text can become important in the re-entextualized version, for instance. Resemiotization, in line with the foregoing, refers to the process by means of which every
“repetition” of a sign involves an entirely new set of contextualization conditions and thus
results in an entirely “new” semiotic process, allowing new semiotic modes and resources to
be involved in the repetition process (Leppänen et al. 2014). The specific affordances for
responsive and sharing activities offered by social media platforms are thus not unified or
homogeneous: we can distinguish a gradient from purely responsive uptake to active and
redirected re-entextualization and resemiotization, blurring the distinction made by Shifman
between virality and memicity.
Let us have a closer look at memes now, and focus again on the different genres of memic
activity we can discern.
The weird world of memes
As we have seen, Shifman locates the difference between virality and memicity in the degree
to which the sign itself is changed in the process of transmission and circulation. Memes are
signs the formal features of which have been changed by users. Shifman draws on Richard
Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), who coined “meme” by analogy with “gene” as
“small cultural units of transmission (…) which are spread by copying or imitation” (Shifman
2011: 188). We have already seen, however, that even simple “copying” or “imitation”
activities such as Facebook “sharing” involve a major shift in activity type called reentextualization. Memes – often multimodal signs in which images and texts are combined –
would typically enable intense resemiotization as well, in that original signs are altered in
various ways, generically germane – a kind of “substrate” recognizability would be
maintained – but situationally adjusted and altered so as to produce very different
communicative effects. Memes tend to have an extraordinary level of semiotic productivity
which involves very different kinds of semiotic activity – genres, in other words.
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Let us consider Figures 2-3-4 and 5-6-7. In Figure 2 we see the origin of a successful meme, a
British World War II propaganda poster.
Figure 2: British wartime propaganda poster.
A virtually endless range of resemiotized versions of this poster went viral since the year
2000; they can be identified as intertextually related by the speech act structure of the
message (an adhortative “keep calm” or similar statements, followed by a subordinate
adhortative) and the graphic features of lettering and layout (larger fonts for the adhortatives,
the use of a coat of arms-like image). Variations on the memic theme range from minimal to
maximal, but the generic template is constant. Figure 3 shows a minimally resemiotized
variant in which lettering and coat of arms (the royal crown) are kept, while in Figure 5, the
royal crown has been changed by a beer mug.
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Figure 3: Keep calm and call Batman
Figure 4: Keep calm and drink beer.
In Figures 2-3-4 we see how one set of affordances – the visual architecture of the sign and its
speech act format – becomes the intertextual link enabling the infinite resemiotizations while
retaining the original semiotic pointer: most users of variants of the meme would know that
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the variants derive from the same “original” meme. The visual architecture and speech act
format of the “original”, thus, are the “mobile” elements in memicity here: they provide
memic-intertextual recognizability, while the textual adjustments redirect the meme towards
more specific audiences and reset it in different frames of meaning and use.
The opposite can also apply, certainly when memes are widely known because of textualstylistic features: the actual ways in which “languaging” is performed through fixed
expressions and speech characteristics. A particularly successful example of such textualstylistic memicity is so-called “lolspeak”, the particular pidginized English originally
associated with funny images of cats (“lolcats”), but extremely mobile as a memic resource in
its own right. Consider Figure 5-6-7. Figure 5 documents the origin of this spectacularly
successful meme: a picture of a cat, to which the caption “I can has cheezburger?” was added,
went viral in 2007 via a website “I can has cheezburger?”. The particular caption phrase went
viral as well and became tagged to a wide variety of other images – see Figure 6. The caption,
then, quickly became the basis for a particular pidginized variety of written English, which
could in turn be deployed in a broad range of contexts (see Figure 7). The extraordinary
productivity of this meme-turned-language-variety was demonstrated in 2010, when a team of
“lolspeak” authors completed a translation of the entire Bible in their self-constructed
language variety. The Lolcat Bible can now be purchased as a book through Amazon.
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Figure 5: I can has cheezburger?
Figure 6: President and a possible voter having cheezburger
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Figure 7: I has a dream.
The different resources that enter into the production of such memes can turn out to be memic
in themselves; we are far from the “copying and imitating” used by Dawkins in his initial
definition of memes. People, as we said, are extraordinarily creative in reorganizing,
redirecting and applying memic resources over a vast range of thematic domains, addressing a
vast range of audiences while all the same retaining clear and recognizable intertextual links
to the original memic sources. This fundamental intertextuality allows for combined memes,
in which features of different established memes are blended in a “mashup” meme. Figure 8
shows such a mashup meme:
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Figure 8: Keep calm and remove the arrow from your knee.
We see the familiar template of the “Keep calm” meme, to which a recognizable reference to
another meme is added. The origin of this other meme, “then I took an arrow in the knee”, is
in itself worthy of reflection, for it shows the essentially arbitrary nature of memic success.
The phrase was originally uttered by characters from a video game “Skyrim” (Figure 9). The
phrase is quite often repeated throughout the game, but this does not in itself offer an
explanation for the viral spread of the expression way beyond the community of Skyrim
gamers.
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Figure 9: Skyrim scene “Then I took an arrow in the knee”
The phrase became wildly productive and can now be tagged to an almost infinite range of
different expressions, each time retaining a tinge of its original apologetic character, and
appearing in mashups, as we saw in Figure 8.
What we see in each of these examples is how memes operate via a combination of
intertextual recognizability and individual creativity – individual users adding an “accent” to
existing viral memes, in attempts to go viral with their own adapted version. The work of
resemiotization involved in such processes can be complex and demanding. Mashup memes,
for instance, involves elaborate knowledge of existing memes, an understanding of the
affordances and limitations for altering the memes, and graphic, semiotic and technological
skills to post them online. The different forms of resemiotization represent different genres of
communicative action, ranging from maximally transparent refocusing of existing memes to
the creation of very different and new memes, less densely connected to existing ones.
Two points need to be made now. First, we do not see such resemiotizations, even drastic and
radical ones, as being fundamentally different from the “likes” and “shares” we discussed in
the previous section. We have seen that “likes” and “shares” are already different genres
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characterized by very different activity patterns, orientations to addressees and audiences, and
degrees of intervention in the original signs. The procedures we have reviewed here differ in
degree but not in substance: they are, like “retweets”, “likes” and “shares”, reentextualizations of existing signs, i.e. meaningful communicative operations that demand
different levels of agency and creativity of the user. Second, and related to this, the nature of
the original sign itself – its conventionally understood “meaning” – appears to be less relevant
than the capacity to deploy it in largely phatic, relational forms of interaction, again ranging
from what Malinowski described as “communion” – ritually expressing membership of a
particular community – to “communication” within the communities we described as held
together by “ambient affiliation”. “Meaning” in its traditional sense needs to give way here to
a more general notion of “function”. Memes, just like Mark Zuckerberg’s status updates, do
not need to be read in order to be seen and understood as denotationally and informationally
meaningful; their use and re-use appear to be governed by the “phatic” and “emblematic”
functions often seen as of secondary nature in discourse-analytic literature.
Conviviality on demand
But what explains the immense density of such phatic forms of practice on social media?
How do we make sense of the astonishing speed and scope with which such phatic forms of
communion and communication circulate, creating – like in the case of Gangnam Style –
perhaps the largest-scale collective communicative phenomena in human history? The
explanations, we hope to have shown, do not necessarily have to be located in the features of
the signs themselves, nor in the specific practices they prompt – both are unspectacular. So
perhaps the explanations must be sought in the social world in which these phatic practices
make sense.
In a seminal paper, Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2010: 120) distinguish between email
and Twitter. They have this to say on the topic:
“(…) the difference between Twitter and email is that the latter is primarily a directed
technology with people pushing content to persons listed in the “To:” field, while
tweets are made available for interested individuals to pull on demand. The typical
email has an articulated audience, while the typical tweet does not.”
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The statement demands nuancing, for we have seen that even minimal forms of activity such
as “sharing” involve degrees of audience design – the seemingly vacuous identity statements
we described above, lodged in social media practices, are always directed at some audience,
of which users have some idea, right or wrong (cf. Androutsopoulos 2013). Imaginary
audiences are powerful actors affecting discursive behaviour, as Goffman and others have
shown so often (e.g. Goffman 1963), and Marwick and boyd’s early statement that “Twitter
flattens multiple audiences into one” – a phenomenon they qualify as “context collapse” – is
surely in need of qualification (Marwick & boyd 2010: 122). The intricate social-semiotic
work we have described here certainly indicates users having diverse understandings of
audiences on social media. Different social media platforms offer opportunities for different
types of semiotic and identity work, and users often hold very precise and detailed views of
what specific platforms offer them in the way of audience access, identity and communication
opportunities and effects (cf. Gershon 2010).
At the same time, Marwick and boyd are correct in directing our attention towards the kinds
of communities in which people move on social media. In spite of precise ideas of specific
target audiences and addressees, it is certainly true that there is no way in which absolute
certainty about the identities (and numbers) of addressees can be ascertained on most social
media platforms – something which Edward Snowden also made painfully clear. In addition,
it is true that lump categories such as Facebook “friends” gather a range of – usually never
explicitly defined – subcategories ranging from “real-life friends” and close relatives to what
we may best call, following Goffman again, “acquaintances”. Goffman (1963), as we know,
described acquaintances as that broad category of people within the network of US middle
class citizens with whom relations of sociality and civility need to be maintained. Avoidance
of overt neglect and rejection are narrowly connected to avoidance of intimacy and
“transgressive” personal interaction: what needs to be maintained with such people is a
relationship of conviviality – a level of social intercourse characterized by largely “phatic”
and “polite” engagement in interaction. Acquaintances are not there to be “loved”, they are
there to be “liked”. Facebook is made exactly for these kinds of social relationships (van
Dijck 2013), which is perhaps also why a discourse analysis of Facebook interaction reveals
the overwhelming dominance of the Gricean Maxims, that old ethnotheory of “polite” US
bourgeois interaction (Varis forthcoming).
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But let us delve slightly deeper into this. The communities present as audiences on social
media may be at once over-imagined and under-determined: while users can have relatively
precise ideas of who it is they are addressing, a level of indeterminacy is inevitable in reality.
This means, in analysis, that we cannot treat such communities in the traditional sense of
“speech community” as a group of people tied together by clear and generally shareable rules
of the indexical value and function of signs (Agha 2007). Indexical orders need to be built, as
a consequence, since they cannot readily be presupposed. Virality, as a sociolinguistic
phenomenon, might be seen as moments at which such indexical orders – perceived
shareability of meaningful signs – are taking shape. The two billion views of Gangnam Style
suggest that large numbers of people in various places on earth recognized something in the
video; what it is exactly they experienced as recognizable is hard to determine, and research
on this topic – how virality might inform us on emergent forms of social and cultural
normativity in new and unclear large globalized human collectives – is long overdue.
Some suggestions in this direction can be offered, though. In earlier work, we tried to
describe ephemeral forms of community formation in the online-offline contemporary world
as “focused but diverse” (Blommaert & Varis 2013). Brief moments of focusing on perceived
recognizable and shareable features of social activity generate temporary groups – think of the
thousands who “liked” Zuckerberg’s status update – while such groups do not require the
kinds of strong and lasting bonds grounded in shared bodies of knowledge we associate with
more traditionally conceived “communities” or “societies”. In fact, they are groups selected
on demand, so to speak, by individual users in the ways we discussed earlier. People can
focus and re-focus perpetually, and do so (which explains the speed of virality) without being
tied into a community of fixed circumscription, given the absence of the deep and strong
bonds that tie them together, and the absence of temporal and spatial copresence that
characterizes online groups.
A joint “phatic” focus on recognizable form or shape offers possibilities for such processes of
groupness, while the actual functional appropriation and deployment of signs – what they
actually mean for actual users – is hugely diverse; the infinite productivity of memes – the
perpetual construction of memic “accents” – illustrates this. Here we begin to see something
fundamental about communities in an online age: the joint focusing, even if “phatic”, is in
itself not trivial, it creates a structural level of conviviality, i.e. a sharing at one level of
meaningful interaction by means of a joint feature, which in superficial but real ways
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translates a number of individuals into a focused collective. Note, and we repeat, that what
this collective shares is the sheer act of phatic communion (the “sharing” itself, so to speak),
while the precise meaning of this practice for each individual member of the collective is
impossible to determine. But since Malinowski and Goffman, we have learned not to
underestimate the importance of unimportant social activities. Memes force us to think about
levels of social structuring that we very often overlook because we consider them
meaningless.
This neglect of conviviality has effects. In the superdiversity that characterizes online-offline
social worlds, we easily tend to focus on differences and downplay the level of social
structuring that actually prevents these differences from turning into conflicts. Recognizing
such hitherto neglected levels of social structuring might also serve as a corrective to rapid
qualifications of the present era as being “postsocial” – a point on which we disagree with
Vincent Miller. There is a great deal of sociality going on on social media, but this sociality
might require a new kind of sociological imagination. We will look in vain for communities
and societies that resemble the ones proposed by Durkheim and Parsons. But that does not
mean that such units are not present, and even less that they are not in need of description.
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